New Prototype Project Guidelines

New Project Information

Our passion is custom injection molding and the process of bringing new plastic products to market. We truly enjoy sharing in the opportunity to learn about a new idea, product, or company and providing input to help you be successful.

Information necessary to review and quote projects requiring new tooling:

3D Files in .igs or .STP formats. This is the starting point for us to be able to evaluate the geometry and constraints in building tooling.

2D Mechanical drawings: The drawings will allow us to evaluate specified finishes, textures, dimensions, and tolerances. This is not necessary for quoting but will be required for production.

Material: The material is necessary for final tool design and for quoting of piece part price. If there are multiple colors or custom colors this should be noted. Our engineering team can help you with material selection.

Quantities: Production quantities will drive tooling design, material and cavitation.

This information will be required by any manufacturer. If you do not have this information we are pleased to review your project and help connect you with resources that will be able to help you prepare. Typically the first point of contact is an industrial design firm. We recommend you interview a few industrial design firms. When evaluating first try to find a designer that you feel communicates well with you and clearly understands your concept, ideas and requirements. Second, look at their portfolio to see if they have worked on similar products so that you can leverage the experience gained from prior work.

Please contact us if you would like a reference to one of our Industrial Design Firm contacts.

Is injection molding the best manufacturing process for your project?

To help all involved we will take the time to review the project and if it is not a good fit we will help point you in the right direction and provide contacts to get your plastic project done as efficiently as possible.

The plastics industry is a very fragmented industry with many different manufacturing techniques to produce products from plastic. The primary methods for manufacturing plastic parts include machining and fabrication, extrusion, blow molding, thermoforming, casting, additive manufacturing (digital printing), rotational molding and injection molding. Even within the manufacturing discipline of injection molding, there are many different specialties so it is difficult to know if a specific product is a good fit. The following are general guidelines for new injection molding projects for Texas Injection Molding.

Quantity: It is hard to generalize, but we typically are best suited for the mid-volume production of 10,000 – 500,000 units. We are not well suited for annual quantities under 5,000 or in the multi-million parts.

Material: We process most commodity and engineering grade materials, but may not be well suited for some high heat materials that require special equipment. There are specialty manufacturers and industries built specifically to support these materials. Examples may be PEEK, Teflon or Silicone.

Size of customer: Like most businesses, we must manage risk to prosper and seek to build our company through long-lasting relationships with financially stable companies that have a demonstrated track record of success and in bringing innovative products to the market with established products and distribution channels. We are entrepreneurs and enjoy helping other entrepreneurs achieve their dream, but we must be very selective in products we invest our limited engineering resources to bring a new product to market. Entrepreneurs typically are fun to work with, very demanding and have the job of developing every area of business. (Identifying markets, finding customers, establishing distribution, inventory and warehousing, product development, packaging, business systems, accounting and administrative systems.) The combination of limited resources and business development requirements create high risk so we may

Part size: Our machines range in size from 55 tons to over 800 tons and shot size of 2.97 oz. to 117 oz. As a custom injection molder, we maintain a broad range of press and shot size capacity that fit the majority of the market.

If you have questions or wish to discuss your project further, please call us at 281-489-4292.